BUENOS AIRES – Argentina’s government has resumed inflation reporting after a six-month hiatus, revealing that consumer prices rose 4.2 percent in May from the previous month.

After his inauguration last December, conservative President Mauricio Macri said he would suspend the publication of inflation figures, whose reliability under two previous leftist heads of state – Cristina Fernandez and her late husband Nestor Kirchner – had been questioned since early 2007, and develop a new method for measuring consumer prices.

“We’re clearly and definitively leaving behind a period of manipulation of public statistics,” Jorge Todesca, the director of the National Census and Statistics Institute, or INDEC, said on Wednesday.

Inflation in May was driven by, among other things, a 5.6 percent rise in transportation and communication prices and a 5.2 percent increase in housing and basic services.

In numerous speeches since taking office, Macri has said his priority is to lower inflation after a decade in which he said consumer prices under Kirchner, who governed from 2003 to 2007, and Fernandez, in office from 2007 to 2015, rose 700 percent.

He has said inflation rates will rise in the short term due to the elimination of utility subsidies but begin to fall in the second half of 2016.

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